


In twisted braids of lilies knitting/The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair

by glorious_clio



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-15
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-20 17:10:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6017980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_clio/pseuds/glorious_clio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leia is busy, so busy, and Han's load isn't much lighter, but he finds a way to make her feel better no matter what.  Set after RotJ. Title from Severn, the River Sabrina by John Milton. Written and posted to tumblr 7 days before TFA came out. Includes my headcanon that Padme faked her death and was Leia’s wetnurse okay bye.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In twisted braids of lilies knitting/The loose train of thy amber-dropping hair

She wasn’t sure how it really started. After a long meeting one night, she had returned to the quarters that she shared with Han and immediately sank onto their bunk. She was fighting a tension headache that had more than a million causes and running on two hours of sleep, when Han pulled her back to him and carefully, so carefully, began dismantling the hair that was piled on her head.  

And it surprised her that she was surprised. Leia had often observed his talented fingers- making repairs on the Falcon, for instance.  (Dirty hands, she called them, or was it her own hands that were dirty?)  Hands that were almost always proving their dexterity.  But he had never done this, gently pulling pins and binders, slowly combing out locks of her soft brown hair.

He removed a pin that she hadn’t even realized was digging into her skull and Leia sighed, loudly.  

“How’m I doin’?”

“If you want a job as my handmaiden, I’ll see to it that you make the shortlist.”

“Tempting. What kind of benefits package does that gig offer?”

“Oh, all the perks. But you do occasionally have to pose as my decoy if my life might be in danger.”

“Well, you know I’ll do my best to protect you, Princess,” he said, then leaned in close. “But you look better in a dress.”

She dropped her chin to her chest, trying to hide her laugh and failing.  

A few pins later and he was done, and gently carded her hair into her natural part.  

She scrubbed her hands over her face and felt him pull himself off the bunk, and shouldn’t have been surprised when he returned with her hairbrush.  Will wonder at wonders never cease?

As he went through the customary hundred strokes, Leia tried not to think of the last time someone did this for her.  

* * *

It’s an Alderaan tradition, that a woman’s hair be up and secure in elaborate coifs and braids. She learned this from her queenly mother, of course, but her Naboo governesses instilled these traditions, as well. Sabe was especially good at coaxing out elaborate styles. There were a lot of similarities between Naboo and Alderaan, to the point where she sometimes didn’t know which was which.

“Your hair is like your mother’s” she would say, and when Leia would know that Sabe didn’t mean Breha.  When she would try to question her further, Sabe would press her lips together, Dorme would shoot her a significant glance, and Leia would know this was a secret, like the secrets father kept with Mon Mothma. Secrets that came in a trickle, secrets that she would have to hold inside of her.  Close the doors in your brain firmly, lock them up tight, don’t let anyone in. People are out to take your secrets, and you can’t always share them.

(She collects these secrets about her birth mother, whom Leia suspects was her nursemaid who died when she was about four; beautiful, kind, but so sad. Sabe and even Dorme sometimes lets slip a shining fact and Leia collects it like a magpie. But she thinks her parents would be sad if they knew she wondered what her birth mother’s favorite color was.)

While women of Alderaan trim their ends when they start to split, cutting off a significant amount of hair is something radical, perhaps even desperate.  So when Princess Leia, last of the Royal House of Organa, loses her beloved Alderaan, she has half a mind to shave her hair- shorter than Han or Luke’s.  She doesn’t know what else to do on their short trip to Yavin.  

She stands in front of a mirror with a pair of shears in one hand and sets it down and walks away.  

Leia sometimes thinks about that moment, and wonders why she didn’t just do it, damn it. She would have been free of the weight of it and maybe the weight of….

But it is important that she remain a planetary princess, even if she doesn’t have a planet, a senator without a senate to serve in.  She also can’t bear to sever her ties with the hair that was mostly grown on her home planet.

Over the next few years, she has a love/hate relationship with her hair, among other things in her so-called life.  Still she lets her hair grow and grow and grow, if nothing else, to prove that she can nurture something, even as everything around her burns, and even the majority of their victories come at too high of costs, even as something as personal as her menses stop because of stress and an avoidance of any sort of normal sleeping and eating routine. Trimming split ends feels like a loss, and Leia is again relieved she never cut off her own locks the day she was rescued.

Her braids and curls and pins are a constant, and it is really, so small. The only thing she can do for herself sometimes, to maintain some semblance of control, when her skin is too pale with purple bags under her eyes that look like bruises from spending too much time in command centers.  A hairstyle is a nod to the normalcy that she suspects will never return. The tighter the braid, the harder she holds onto her control.

With the Ewoks, well. That was a one time thing, and it didn’t last long.  She wasn’t used to the curtain of hair that acted like a cape, that fluttered when she moved.  Post-Endor it was business as usual in front of the mirror.

* * *

“There,” Han said, clearly pleased with his handiwork.  

She turned around and burrowed into his chest.  

“Thank you.”

“Sure thing.”

“Now let’s see if you can put it back.”

“Uhhhh… that might prove difficult.”

“Well then you can forget the handmaiden job,” she teased.  

“I’ll cope.”

A few hours later, after a rushed meal and a cat nap, she piled it all up again, pinned it into place, grabbed her datapad and was out the door. Han had his own duties to attend to.  But that night in their quarters, he made it a point to unpin and comb out her hair again.


End file.
